The Romney Bullies & Apologists

NOTE: My bi-polar response to Mitt Romney, as of this writing, is that I will vote for him in November. Tomorrow I may not feel that way.

I read somewhere that the reason Mitt Romney is going to win in South Carolina is because Newt Gingrich is running welly welly bad commercials about him. Please note the tears falling from my eyes are from eye drops, and not fake sentiment. If this circular logic were true, then Newt Gingrich would have won in Iowa and New Hampshire after Mitt Romney Romney’s SuperPAC ran really nasty ads about him.

There are rules of the game. One doesn’t compare certain things to Nazis thereby violating Godwin’s Law. One of the reasons The Pink Flamingo is no longer taking many of Mitt Romney’s apologists seriously is because of things like the idiocy the once great Charles Krauthammer wrote about Ron Paul. Speaking of which, one of the few times you can get away with mentioning Nazis and not violate Godwin’s law is when discussing some of Ron Paul’s more colorful supporters who are, in fact, white supremacists, KKK, and Nazis. It is a wonder Krauthammer can even be taken seriously after writing this stuff.

“...Put aside your own view of libertarianism or of Paul himself. I see libertarianism as an important critique of the Leviathan state, not a governing philosophy. As for Paul himself, I find him a principled, somewhat wacky, highly engaging eccentric. But regardless of my feelings or yours, the plain fact is that Paul is nurturing his movement toward visibility and legitimacy….”

Mitt Romney’s supporters have officially lost it. They are now comparing Newt’s SuperPac ad to the work Leni Riefenstahl did for Hitler. Yep, Rich Lowery is over the top, gone to lala land. He’s comparing Newt’s superpac to a Nazi propagandist. (H/T Dan Riehl) They don’t seem to be processing the fact that the door swings both ways in politics. The worst part is the fact that we are dealing with seasoned professionals who know better.

Goodwin's Law

“…This is getting ridiculous, the contortions people are undergoing to make believe Bain is not a problem for Mitt Romney. It’s bad enough that they have conflated defending Bain with a defense of capitalism and free markets. I also noted yesterday how a couple of Romney defenders on Twitter were suggesting that criticisms of Mitt Romney’s financial dealings at Bain were suggestive of anti-Semitic attacks on Jewish financiers…King of Bain had some factual inaccuracies, but not more so than anti-Newt ads run by Romney’s SuperPAC. To compare it to Triumph of the Will is beyond absurd. Stop everyone and think. Do you really need to go Godwin in order to defend Bain? And if so, what does that say about your defense?…”

Rich Lowery actually wrote this dribble:

NRO

Newt has made the comment:

“...“This call for accuracy, however, is a two way street. Just as candidates must be certain to accurately present their own records, they also have a responsibility to describe the records of their fellow candidates accurately. And they have a responsibility to make sure that their supporters are doing the same.

“This week, fact check organizations like The Washington Post and Politifact have ranked advertisements produced by Super-PACs supporting Governor Romney and myself as containing enormous inaccuracies.

“I am calling for the Winning Our Future Super-PAC supporting me to either edit its “King of Bain” advertisement and movie to remove its inaccuracies, or to pull it off the air and off the internet entirely.

“Furthermore, I am once again calling on Governor Romney to issue a similar call for the Super-PAC supporting him to edit or remove its ads which have been shown to contain gross inaccuracies, something the Governor has thus far refused to do.

“The American people deserve a robust debate and full comparison of the plans and records of the people who are asking for their vote. They also deserve assurances that the information they are hearing is accurate. I am committed to holding my campaign and my supporters to this high standard of accuracy and I hope Governor Romney will do the same.”…”

Mitt Romney and his supporters are acting like cry-babies over the fact that Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry are going at it with him. They run in circles, scream and shout, but never bother mentioning that Romney fired the first shot. It needs to be remembered that Mitt Romney threw the first punch.

“…I came across an interesting video from learnliberty.org, an advocate of free markets and capitalism. The title of the video is “Top 3 Common Myths of Capitalism”. In the video Jeffrey Miron, PhD explains that the first myth is “that being pro capitalism is the same as being pro business. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The point of capitalism is to make sure that businesses have to compete vigorously against each other and that benefits consumers. It’s not good for the businesses per se because they have to work really hard so many business understand this and they hate capitalism and they are constantly trying to get government to erect various rules, restrictions, regulations that help them but that are not in the interests of the consumers.” Just because Bain profits from the rules and regulations put in place by government does not mean Bain itself is pro-capitalist.

Many people are mistakenly conflating the idea of business and capitalism. But the truth is that almost every single business would welcome a regulation that aided it and hurt its competitors. That’s not capitalism. And as I stated in earlier post, Bain under Romney was expert at navigating the rules that give certain business advantages and tax breaks and protection. All perfectly legal but perhaps not very appetizing when unemployment is hovering around 9%….”

Legal Insurrection

You can’t blame this one on Newt.

“...I’m well aware of which side I’m on between Left and Right and a strong supporter of free enterprise who knows who is its enemy. But look how this messaging from the Obama campaign speaks directly to the middle class, touts free enterprise, while scorching Romney over Bain. Meanwhile, Mitt allegedly has the best consultants money can buy and hardly had a rapid response, which boiled down to little more than, you’re attacking capitalism and Mitt likes to fire people. Oh, and you’re “envious” of people like Mitt. Simply brilliant, not.

Even when they tweak the response, Jim DeMint is out today saying Romney has to work on his empathy. Really? After running for office for 12 or more years? The Right can win with the right messaging but it also needs the right messenger. Time and again, I’ve come away with the strong impression that Mitt Romney isn’t it. He walked away from a re-election campaign and is one for three for a reason. He may be a great capitalist but he is an extremely weak politician….”

Legal Insurrectoni

From a comment on Dan Riehl’s blog

“…Where was Lowry when Romney was setting up a website specifically to attack Rick Perry, and saying that Rick Perry was not responsible for the job increases in Texas? Where was Lowry when 45% of the negative ads running in Iowa were from Mitt attacking Newt Gingrich? Now that his guy is in the barrel, he’s got his Hanes all in a wad?

Romney made a choice; he could run on his record as governor of Massachusetts, or try to run on his business acumen. He chose the later because he knew that his gubernatorial record would not hold up to scrutiny. Saying “Well, my hands were tied because I had a Democrat Congress” would have made him look weak and unable to lead his state, and consequently the nation. So he chose Bain, and it’s on that Bain fence he will hang himself.

Little by little, more and more will come out about Bain and its corporate raider philosphy. The WSJ just published a short list of the companies taken over by Bain and it is clear Bain was not investing in those businesses for the long haul. It was a slash and burn policy, and if the company lucked out and survived, well, all the better, but if it didn’t, Bain reaped massive profits anyway by loading the companies with massive loans that were used to pay off the initial investors, i.e. Mitt Romney.

Now, rags will tell you that HE is not afraid of David Axelrod (as if it were rags running against Obama) but I guaran-damn-tee you, Romney is. And the more Romney appears to be The-One-Selected-By-All-Conservative-Talking-Heads-Using-Their-Influnce-On-The-Little-People the deeper Axelrod will dig and the harder Axelrod will attack….”

WPost

“…By all accounts, Romney was a highly successful venture capitalist. While running Bain Capital, he helped pick some real winners, earning his investors substantial returns. High finance is a difficult subject to convey in a sound bite, so Romney evidently has chosen to focus on job creation.

This is a mistake, because it overstates the purposes of Bain’s investments and has now led Romney into a factually challenging cul-de-sac.

Romney never could have raised money from investors if the prospectus seeking $1-million investments from the super wealthy had said it would focus on creating jobs. Instead, it said: “The objective of the fund is to achieve an annual rate of return on invested capital in excess of the returns generated by conventional investments in the public equity market and the private equity market.”

Indeed, the prospectus never mentions “jobs,” “job,” or “employees.”

Second, it has become increasingly hard to understand how Romney’s personal involvement played a role in creating these jobs, especially years later. He clearly is adding up all the jobs now at the companies that are thriving, arguing these numbers far outweigh the job losses at companies that failed. But as the Wall Street Journal reported Monday, the failure rate one can attribute to Bain Capital changes significantly if one counts five years from an investment or eight years from an investment.

Bain, in fact, rejected the Journal’s analysis, saying it “uses a fundamentally flawed methodology that unfairly assigns responsibility to us for many events that occurred in companies when we did not own or control them, and disregards dozens of successful venture capital investments.”

In other words, Bain appears to be rejecting a central premise of Romney’s calculation — that years after the investment ended, one can attribute either good news or bad news about the company to Bain’s involvement.

Romney is generally careful to use phrases such as “helped create.” He also acknowledged Saturday that we “were investors to help get them going.” But even that overstates the case.

Bain may have provided management expertise or money when others would not, but a company such as Staples — one of the biggest contributors to Romney’s job figures — was largely the brainchild of entrepreneur Tom Stemberg. Stemberg presumably should get most of the credit for inventing a killer new business category. (Left unsaid, of course, is all the jobs that might have been lost at small stationery stores unable to compete with the low prices of Staples, Office Depot and so forth.)

Moreover, should Romney even get any credit for jobs at Domino’s, as his campaign claims? The deal in which Bain Capital bought Domino’s closed on Dec. 21, 1998, according to a Domino’s news release that referred to “Milt Romney.” Less than two months later Romney had left Bain to run the Salt Lake Olympics, meaning he had barely any role in running the company once it became part of the Bain investment portfolio….”

WPost

“...The ad says that Gingrich “co-sponsored a bill with Nancy Pelosi that would have given $60 million a year to a U.N. program supporting China’s brutal one-child policy.” Actually, the bill attempted to address climate change, and a third of House members were co-sponsors. The bill did propose money for the United Nations Population Fund, but it stated specifically that its funding could not be used for “involuntary sterilization or abortion or to coerce any person to accept family planning.” The ad’s claim rests on repeated distortions, so we rate the statement Pants on Fire!…”

WPost

Newt hit Romney with his French ad.

“…Continuing a pattern for Gingrich ads, this one also goes after Romney on abortion, repeating a misleading claim that Romney’s health care law called for “taxpayer-funded abortions.” As we’ve said a few times now, the law didn’t say anything about abortions. Instead, the state exchange later determined that subsidized health plans would cover abortions, following a state Supreme Court decision that the state must cover medically necessary abortions if it’s covering other necessary care for pregnant women.

Gingrich’s anti-French ad is close to the mark when it says Romney “raised taxes.” It’s true that he raised many “fees,” which some may view as taxes, while governor of Massachusetts as part of his effort to close a $1.2 billion budget gap. And he cut local aid, shifting a higher tax burden to localities, and closed loopholes, raising more tax revenue from corporations. The ad also correctly says Romney voted for a Democrat in the 1992 presidential primary. He has said that he voted for Paul Tsongas in the Democratic primary, rather than vote for President George H.W. Bush in the Republican primary, because Bush was assured the nomination. Romney, who was then a registered independent, told ABC News in 2007: “When there was no real contest in the Republican primary, I’d vote in the Democrat primary, vote for the person who I thought would be the weakest opponent for the Republican.” But he also had told the Boston Globe in 1994 that he chose to vote in the Democratic primary because Tsongas was from Massachusetts and he liked his ideas better than Bill Clinton’s — and also, because Bush was going to win the GOP nomination.

The ad attributes the quote that “Romney will say anything” to the Manchester Union Leader in New Hampshire. That was the headline on a short column by the publisher of the paper, and that was the gist of his remarks.

As for his French-speaking skills, Romney honed those as a Mormon missionary in France for a few years in the 1960s. Gingrich’s ad highlights a clip of Romney greeting French volunteers to the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. We’ll have to leave it to voters to decide whether being able to chat in français is a good thing or a bad thing. Gingrich (as well as Romney) has no problem reaching out to U.S. voters in Spanish….”

Damn Dirty RINO

Like Democrats for Sale says:

“...Even on the blogs if you dare criticize Romney, you get clobbered by his paid surrogates out policing the blogs. A few ‘real’ conservatives are standing up like Erickson from Red State but not many. They have swallowed the Bush 41 koolaid about Romney being more conservative then we think but his record and his comments say otherwise. American conservatives are being scammed by the establishment Republicans once again like with Bob Dole. This time instead of Buchanan, Ron Paul is the bogeyman to make Romney look better….”

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SJ Reidhead (aka The Pink Flamingo) is a writer based in New Mexico. The author of two published novels, both westerns: Dust Devil and The Second Mrs. Earp and two published works of non-fictions: TRAVESTY: Frank Waters Earp Agenda Exposed and A Church for Helldorado, Endicott Peabody's 1882 Tombstone Diary. One of the leading authorities on the life of Wyatt Earp and Tombstone during the Earp years, she is currently writing a series of murder mysteries set in modern day Tombstone. The author is also working on a book about fashion in the Wild West. When complete, there will be over 2100 unpublished antique photographs dating from 1855-1910.

The author's work has appeared in Wild West, True West, Blogcritics, and The Tombstone Times. Recently the author has had to deal with a father who succumbed to Alzheimer's Disease. This is leading to a book dealing with the frustrations of dealing with the frustrations of the disease, finance, legal, health-care, and things no one bothers telling families about it. She is currently working on a murder mystery series set in modern day Tombstone and Cochise County. Several books of essays on Christian living are currently in edits. A book of essays and revisions of articles about Wyatt Earp has been completed and will include her latest work detailing her theory about the murder of his second wife, Mattie.

SJ Reidhead has been involved in Republican politics since she was 'a little kid'. During the Reagan years she was a lobbyist working with various non-profit organizations who were attempting to salvage NASA and the American space program after the disastrous Carter years. In spite of ups and downs, and numerous disappointments, politically, it is obvious the only political hope for this country is via the Republican Party. Along with politics she is an opera fanatic, has been known to stalk baritones to the point of being a baritone junkie, and loves baseball.

The Pink Flamingo went on line on October 4, 2005.

THE PINK FLAMINGO STORY

It started out as a joke. During the seven years I worked with the girls of my parish, leading a youth group, one of the things that I stressed were manners. Part of having manners, the way I see it, is to know how to set a proper table, host a party, cater it, and clean up afterward. I was fortunate enough to have a group of very talented girls in my youth group. They learned how to plan for, and execute large church functions, very properly. During one such function I noticed there were several incredibly tacky pink flamingos sitting on the table. Knowing the girls were up to something, I said nothing. A few months later they did the same thing at a function I was hosting at my home. I said nothing. They had a birthday party for me. More pink flamingos appeared - and a joke was born.

Thanks to the girls, all of whom are now grown, I have a collection of pink flamingos. It has become an ongoing joke. When I began working on my political blog, I realized the only possibly title was The Pink Flamingo!